GHOST IN THE RUINS

GHOST I N T H E RU I NS

Zishen Liu 11743223 History of Architecture Integration SS2021

GHOST I N T H E RU I NS

Zishen Liu Studio Díaz Moreno & García Grinda Professor: Matthias Boeckl Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna History of Architecture Integration SS2021

Introduction

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Site

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Xian Village Conflicts

Historical Projects

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Debris Enclave Apparition

Bibliography

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Images

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Ten Years in Xian Village: Enlightenment on the Hidden Fengshui Pond, Fan Shu, 2020

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Introduction

When you pass by the glamorous skyscrapers in prosperous Guangzhou CBD, there is an unreal place that catches your eyes where dilapidated nail houses stand in the misty green ruins. The debris and trashes imply the traces of living which are the historical cultures that have been cultivated for generations. When it faces a crisis, this conflict between power and desire reveals the hidden corruption. The villagers unite together to resist the process of forced demolition by the government and form a semi-urban rights protection common.

In this paper, I will take a glimpse at the last urban village of Guangzhou CBD - Xian Village. Under the appearance of its ruins, seek the interconnection between its structure, spatial organization and materiality and the historical, social, and political context behind it. And, through the case of Xian Village, it expands to the urban village problem arising from the rapid economic development of China, thinking about a new alternative mode of urbanization which emancipated from the rigid geometries of conventional static central planning. In the following part, I will analyze some historical projects similar to the situation of the site, concluding and integrating the ideas into my diploma thesis. These precedents range from the reconstruction of ruined landscapes to the sub-natural regeneration of debris, from the traces of the enclaves to the spatial memory mapped by the apparition of homes. They are interrelated and formulate the manifesto and core concepts of my project, rethinking the collective memory, spatial emotions and the aesthetic value of ruins.

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The Incision of The City | The Photologging of Xian Village, Guangzhou, Black Station, 2021

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Xian Village

“经营几年的微博，一秒钟就能删除殆尽，然后你转世重来，从 每一个字开始写起。用一生建起的房子，瞬间就可以推倒铲平， 然后你从瓦砾中站起，重新收拾每一块砖、每一片瓦。这就是我 的中国梦：对邪恶不抱幻想，而且明白它将更加邪恶，但不沮丧， 也不绝望，坚韧生长，从零做起，从负数做起，从废墟中做起。”

'A social account running for several years can be deleted in one second, and then you reincarnate, start writing every word. A house built in a lifetime can be torn down in an instant, and then you stand up from the rubble, collect every brick and tile. This is my Chinese dream: to have no illusions about evil, to understand that its rot will only spread; and yet, not to lose heart, not to despair—to begin from zero, from less than zero, and to build in the midst of the ruins.'

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慕容雪村 Murong Xuecun, May 9, 2013

Xian village, the last urban village in Guangzhou Central Business District. This is an ancient village with an agricultural history of more than 800 years. As a pilot area of China's economic reform and opening up, the city of Guangzhou developed rapidly. Xian village was named Diamond Village because of its central location caused by city expansion. The farmland was requisitioned by the government, the village was confined in the rigid grid of central planning of the new town forcing villagers to find another way to earn a living. Instead of planting vegetables, they began to plant houses - transforming the limited homesteads allocated under the planned economy to the multi-functional low-rent housing. Facing the panic of

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1 ‘中国网络观察：慕容雪 村与莎士比亚’，齐之丰， 2013 年 5 月 29 日

1 China Media Watch: Murong Xuecun and Shakespeare, Qi Zhifeng, 29.05.2013

https://www. voachinese.com/a/ china-web-watch -20130528/1669963.html

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Dragons in Diamond Village, Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China (Melville House, 2016), David Bandurski, Introduction

survival crisis, the villagers endlessly densified the village in a barbarian way. Houses were often built tall and slender to obtain more construction space, they were closely next to each other resulting in the extremely narrow streets and alleys in-between and without fresh air and sunshine. Those stiflingly dense houses even continue to grow vertically to roof extension with growing requirements. However, with the development of Guangzhou, the world outside the village was dominated by the power of the state and capital and had become standardized commercial and residential area was dressed in a gorgeous coat of China's socialist modernization. In contrast, Xian village had become an urban village or cheng zhong cun - the village in the midst of the city which was incompatible with the glamorous skin of surrounding skyscrapers, the low-cost semi-urban tenement community has gradually become a low-threshold entry point to the city for accommodating most of the poor and vulnerable rural migrant population with the highest number of more than 100,000 migrants once living there. It was portrayed in China’s media as unsanitary and disorderly founts of instability, like cancers, black spots or breeding grounds of prostitution and crime. But this dismal portrayal overlooks the villages’ crucial role in the country’s economic development. With their essential supply of low-cost housing, Xian village have underwritten low-cost labour in China and mitigated the associated costs of urban living. 2 The village was organized spontaneously, houses were adjacent to each other like monuments forming a in-walled self-sustained enclave.

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Guangzhou Urban Village from a Bird's-eye View, Er Shi Xiong, 2017

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Conflicts

3 Dragons in Diamond Village, Tales of Resistance from Urbanizing China (Melville House, 2016), David Bandurski, 2.

Picking Quarrels and Provoking Trouble

Twelve years ago, the Guangzhou Urban Redevelopment Office approved the Xian Village regeneration to be completed along with eight other urban-village regenerations just six months before the Asian Games open. The 'concept plan' for the regeneration of Xian Village, intending to raze the whole village to the ground and replace it with skyscrapers. The plan included three residential towers for the resettlement of the original villagers, as well as designed office, hotel and retail space. Four ancestral temples in the village would be relocated and rebuilt.3 A fight between power and desire began. The villagers were asked to sign the 'Demolition, Compensation and Resettlement Agreement for the Integral Transformation of Xian Village.' Lu Suigeng, who has served as the party secretary of Xiancun for 30 years, has compiled the "Xiancun Village Chronicle", hoping to retain everyone's common memory and clan feelings. However, this well-intentioned village chronicle did not resonate with the villagers. On the contrary, it also involved a period of land transfer and corruption that had been deliberately concealed for many years, which became the fuse that triggered the villagers' fight. The vast majority of villagers initially refused to sign the contract, they were constantly doing the sit-in protest in front of Lu's office seeking to defend their rights.

The night of 13th, August 2010 was seen as the watershed of this long fight. The largest market in the village was forcibly demolished to requisite the land for highway of Asian Games. More than two thousand riot police held a shield and surrounded the village. Unarmed villagers gathered across the market and could only protest with slogans and gongs.

The police dispatched chilli water and tear gas to disperse

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the people, sixteen excavators waited outside then razed the market into the ground in an instant. Clashes broke out between the villagers and the police. About 50 villagers were injured. Thirteen villagers were accused of "disturbing social order" and sentenced to prison for one to fifteen months. 4 After the violent demolition of the old market, the underworld "siege" that lasted for about half a year followed, and the villagers were forced to sign and approve the demolition as soon as possible. They built a wall to enclose the village, the electricity and water supply were cut off, villagers could only live in panic every day.

Most of the villagers gradually compromised in this long tug of war. However, some are still occupying the house claiming the users of this land, they plugged the red flag on the rooftop, and even arranged the homemade explosives in the room.

They held a banquet for a thousand people on the ruins of demolished primary school which never happen 61 years ago.

Together they establish a rights protection common, trying to resist the demolition and corruption hidden behind it.

Today, when you pass by the CBD of Guangzhou, you can still glimpse an unreal scene through the wall: a few dilapidated buildings that were incompatible with the surroundings. Clothes were hanging on the corridors. Those were nail houses in Xian Village. In-between the houses are the 'green' ruins covered by construction safty net. Behind the decayed buildings were neat and rigid residential towers for resettling the demolished households. looking up, there are many glamorous skyscrapers which are the skin of Guangzhou Zhujiang New Town. This seems to freeze the

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暴力拆迁下的冼村 https://ubeat.com.cuhk. edu.hk/ 暴力拆迁下的冼 村/

mirror image of different eras. At night, it appears to be more layered, unabashedly telling the game and see-saw that is still going on in Xian Village.

Xian village, a land of stars under the prosperous cities of China. Flashing and gloomy. When you enter it, an unexpected familiarity catches your eyes. Narrow and dense, blooming into thousands of stances. If the city is the outer skin of contemporary china, then the village is the inner organ. Various tissues are interconnected with each other.

Although it is full of anxiety, filth, gambling, and sex, what is not concealed is the grassroots landscape rich in the power of the common people, the aroma of cooking permeated in the air and the micro dream built up in the growing houses.

The City Center of Guangzhou, The Former Wasteland, Pearl River New Town after central planning, 2018

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Ten Years in Xian Village: Enlightenment on the Hidden Fengshui Pond, Fan Shu, 2020

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In the early morning of August 13, a large-scale conflict between police and villagers occurred in Xian Village, Tianhe District, Guangzhou

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Market After Demolition, August 13, 2010

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Xiancun Village – A Brave Fight and Sad Loss, the woman to the left in this picture was caught selling vegetables in the area that has been set up as a temporary market since the village’s offical market was demolished in 2010.

Adam Robert, 2012

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Xiancun Village – A Brave Fight and Sad Loss, some posters placed by members of the local resistance. The big red one says over 530 home owners with over 780 buildings refuse to sign demolition contracts. The one below it says that the government starting the demolition process when only 60% of the community have agreed is illegal. Others urge residents to unite and fight the destruction of their community. There is also an article from a paper challenging the legality of the city council’s actions.

Adam Robert, 2012

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Villagers in Xian Village put on red hats with the words "anti-corruption" printed on them, and under the slogan "Suspected of corruption, disclose detailed accounts", they sat in and out of the gate of the village committee first, and then protested around the sidewalks outside Xian Village.

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Villagers in Xian Village put on red hats with the words "anti-corruption" printed on them, and under the slogan "Suspected of corruption, disclose detailed accounts", they sat in and out of the gate of the village committee first, and then protested around the sidewalks outside Xian Village.

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Xiancun Village – A Brave Fight and Sad Loss, all houses on the edge of the community had been covered with government propaganda consisting of slogans urging people to help the community by signing over their properties and promises that they’ll be justly rewarded for doing so.

Adam Robert, 2012

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Xiancun Village – A Brave Fight and Sad Loss, a sign of the government’s desperation to get people out of the community – this banner offers an extra 30,000RMB for homeowners who sign their properties over to the government before a deadline.

Adam Robert, 2012

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A banquet for one thousand people 0n the ruins of primary school in Xian Village, 2013

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Dragon Boat Festival, 2014

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The Incision of The City | The Photologging of Xian Village, Guangzhou, Black Station, 2021

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The Incision of The City | The Photologging of Xian Village, Guangzhou, Black Station, 2021

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The Incision of The City | The Photologging of Xian Village, Guangzhou, Black Station, 2021

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xiancun Village – A Brave Fight and Sad Loss, some of the local residents in the makeshift community centre set up in one of the stores already signed over to the government and gutted after the ancestral hall they previously used was demolished by the city council, Adam Robert, 2012

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Exploring Guangzhou's Urban Villages: Shipai, Xiancun, Tristin Zhang and Jocelyn Richards, 2017

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Night Inside Zhujiang's Xian Village, a group of men drinking and playing cards in a small Xian home, Matthew Bossons, 2015

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Night Inside Zhujiang's Xian Village, Men found impromptu seating on a pile of cement rubble watching television shows, Matthew Bossons, 2015

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Night Inside Zhujiang's Xian Village, sex workers in a Xian alleyway, Matthew Bossons, 2015

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Night Inside Zhujiang's Xian Village, a group of men smoking and chatting near the abandoned Xian police station, Matthew Bossons, 2015

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Xian Cun, Yun Ye (Leafy Yeh)

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Gibellina, Alfio Garozzo, 2012

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Debris

The term débris, originated in France in the eighteenth century and signified a type of broken, scattered substance once part of a standing building or structure. In early modern French architectural writing, authors used debris to describe the scattered and often atomized remains of structures levelled by catastrophic events - typically by war or natural disasters.

Debris reflects the spatial transformation brought by violence and disaster.5 Unrecognizable building fragments imply former existence, and their traces reflect an unforgettable history.

On 15 January 1968, the small town of Gibellina in Sicily was flattened by a catastrophic earthquake. 100,000 people became homeless. The original city of Gibellina was completely destroyed in the earthquake. The reconstruction plan was decided to abandon the old settlements and build the new city - Gibellina Nuova 11 km away instead. To memorize and awake the tragedy of the earthquake, the mayor of Gibellina called on an art project in which Cretto di Burri is the most marvellous and impressive one.

Rather than creating a new monument or sculpture, the Italian painter and sculptor Alberto Burri proposed a monumental landscape spanning over 85,000 square meters on the destroyed ruins of the old city. The whole construction process took 30 years and it was finally completed as a remembrance of Burri.

This is an artificial landscape that is completely different from the surrounding nature. Pieces of austerity white concrete slabs are the crack of land just like the name of the project

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5

Subnature, Architecture's Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), David Gissen, Part Two: Debris, p132

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The Psycho-Geography of the Cretto di Burri, Lilly Cao, 09 Mar 2021, ArchDaily, https://www. archdaily.com/958178/ the-psycho-geographyof-the-cretto-di-burri

cretto, and the whole constitutes a puzzle of the earth, creeping trenches on the rolling foothills. Each concrete slab in the Cretto di Burri was constructed on the originally built area of destroyed buildings, while under its white shell is the ghost of the lost city. The in-between walkable fissures mirror the old town’s streets and alleys, reconjuring the spatial memories of the destroyed city, making it uninhabitable and its in-erasable collective emotion. The Cretto di Burri memorializes and reifies the trauma and grief of the Belice earthquake, with the fissures marking not just the literal roads and streets of the original town but also the violence is done to the land, people and profoundly to the cultural memory of the site.6

Construction of the Great Cretto

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Construction of the Cretto, Art Research

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IL CRETTO DI BURRI, I Luoghi del Cuore

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The GNSS RTK survey was performed on all the blocks that from the work of art, in total, surveying more than 2150 points, Ing. Gianni Faraci and Prof. Ing. Gino Dardanelli DICAM, University of Palermo,2014

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Robin Hood Gardens by Alison and Peter Smithson, 1972. The Smithson Family Collection, © Sandra Lousada

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Similar to Burri's way of burring the debris, the British architects' couple Alison and Peter Smithson created a type of authentic nature that is in contrast with the green park and fieldscapes of other postwar architects and planners. In their Brutalist style Robin Hood Gardens housing project, they preserved the remains of demolished houses that were previously occupied on-site, covered them with soil and grass, creating a new terra-firma of collective landscape between two brutal communal housing.7 The central landscape became an open playground for postwar kids while their parents could easily overlook them while cooking in the kitchen. The circular rising hill is reminiscent of ancient primitive land art, transforming the unrecognizable form of debris into a monumental and ritual public artefact.

Piles of debris in the Robin Hood Gardens, Royal Institute of British Architects, London, 1970

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Subnature, Architecture's Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), David Gissen, Part Two: Debris, p137

Site plan & section

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Perspective

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Landscaping the Athens Acropolis

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Debris, as an unrecognizable form, cannot be easily reconstituted to its original state. On the contrary, it is its fragmented state of decomposition that provides the possibility of recomposition and aggregation. Athenian architect Dimitris Pikionis transformed this fragmented imagery into new patterns of history through subtle reconstitution. His practice in the landscaping of the Acropolis sought an original and modern interpretation of the classical spirit and ancient Greek architecture.

The project consists of a network of paths and architectural interventions as nodes of the routes. The paths that lead visitors up to the famous Parthenon is often mistaken for being a part of classical antiquity but was constructed in modern time. The path provides access to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the Acropolis of Athens and the Philopappos Hill from Dionysiou Areopagitou Street and Apostolou Pavlou Street. It included the renovation of the chapel of Saint Demetrios Loumbardiaris and its churchyard.8 Both of them employed the method of merging and recomposing debris material.

After the Second World War, Greece was in a state of frantic construction and destruction. The economic boom along with an influx of immigrants led to the demolition of existing classical buildings to make room for new modernist apartment blocks (Polikatoikia) across Athens.

Pikionis collected marble and clay shards left over from the demolished lintels, stoops, clay roof tiles and composed them into a collage in the paths. These pieces were put together with new marble stones and concrete elements into

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https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Landscaping_ of_the_Acropolis_of_ Athens

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9 Pikionis’ pathway: Paving the Acropolis, https://archleague. org/article/pikionispathway-pavingacropolis/

https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Landscaping_ of_the_Acropolis_of_ Athens

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ornaments and fragments referring to the past and based on traditional elements. All patterns and shapes of paving, gutters, steps and seats merge naturally into an art piece.

He was influenced by avant-garde artists like Paul Klee, Cezanne and de Chirico.9 Dispersing different expressions or gestures throughout the path gave the new aesthetic value of traditional materials.

Pikionis recruited a team of skilled local Greek craftsmen for construction. He established a mutual relationship between architects and construction workers. He conveyed a general idea and set the design through few drawings as an example.

Craftsmen were free to combine the materials with their own spirit. He said: "The common architectural supervision would be totally inadequate and the architect should build the work himself through the hands of his craftsmen." By supporting craftsmen's creativity, he achieved a perfect result between his guidance and the workers' execution: "Try it as you know; you have your own way. I only gave an idea. I am sure you can set it up better."10 Here, the role of an architect is not to design every detail in the project but stand by side, giving local workers maximum space for creativity. These incidental imperfections give new value to waste materials, mediating old and new, classical and modern.

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Landscaping the Athens Acropolis, © Hélène Binet, 1989 - 2013

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Drawing of the path immediately adjacent to the Propylaea at the Acropolis, Dimitris Pikionis

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St. Dimitrios Loumbardiaris Church, exterior view (up), Material details (bottom), Athens, Greece, 1951

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Ningbo Museum, Amateur Architecture Studio, © Iwan Baan

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Chinese architect Wang Shu used similar strategy to deal with debris in his architectural practice, establishing a dialogue between natural material composition, human vision and natural airflow. In his notion of natural construction, architecture is deemed to be a living natural thing. The so-called 'natural matter' refer to materials that can breathe with natural air or recycled materials that have existed for a long time.11 Facing the rapid urbanization process of China's current demolition and construction, a large number of traditional buildings have been demolished, and a large number of traditional bricks, tiles, and stones have been discarded arbitrarily. A contemporary architect must respond to these urgent issues.

In the project of the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, more than seven million pieces of recycled bricks, tiles, stones and ceramic fragments were used. These recycled materials were combined with concrete masonry technology to develop a construction method called Circular Strategy. He investigated the local traditional architecture.

In the traditional villages of this region, houses need to be quickly rebuilt after the frequent typhoons in summer. The remains of the collapsed buildings did not have time to sort and clean up. The local craftsmen invented a construction technique called 'Wa Pan', mixing more than 80 different sizes of debris into one wall. These bricks and tiles come from different ages, even one thousand years ago. This traditional technique has been preserved by craftsmen, sealing time in the wall and establishing a dialogue across time and space. However, craftsmen who are familiar with this technique have never practised it in contemporary

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11

Zao Fang Zi (Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2016), Wang Shu, Consciousness: The poetry of circular construction-building a world similar to nature, p92

12 Zao Fang Zi (Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2016), Wang Shu, Consciousness: The poetry of circular construction-building a world similar to nature, p93

architecture. Wang Shu and a team of craftsmen carried out repeated experiments on the construction site and utilized it in large-scale buildings. Creating a low cost and low energy consumption architecture he named 'thick wall and thick roof'. Here, similar to Dimitris's landscaping, architects and craftsmen form a mutual relationship. The architect proposes a guiding plan, a sample and the craftsman vividly depicts the building with his hands in an improvised way. Therefore, the building surpasses the design of a certain architect and becomes an anthropological fact.12 In his Ningbo Museum project, traditions and historical memories have also been preserved with huge efforts. The site of the project is located in the centre of the new town area. 30 natural villages have been demolished. A few years ago, there was still a place rich in traditional architecture, and in a blink of an eye, it became a place with almost no memories. The conventional urban planning makes this area of ​​buildings very spaced and extremely empty, and the new building will obviously become an empty monument. Wang Shu treated this building as a village. The volumes on the top of the building divided like a crack, implying the traces of the village that once existed here. The exterior facade and interior walls are made out of debris, and different types of materials are collected from the demolished villages, evoking a memory of the matter. More than 10,000 people visited the museum on the first day after its completion. Many of them were villagers who once lived here. They visited the museum several times in a short period, they said "Because this place got completely demolished, became a new city, I can only find the traces of my past life through this building, I came for

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this reason." Here, they rediscovered the relationship with their demolished homes and the collective memories of the past.

Wang Shu's philosophy of natural construction conveys firm cultural confidence among the impetuous and inane contemporary society of China, seeking a peaceful parallel world, a way to transcend the difference between urban and rural, break the boundaries between professional and amateur, establishing a dialogue between tradition and contemporary, architecture and nature.

Wall detail

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Wa Pan Wall, local construction tectonics in response to frequent typhoon

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Wang Shu's team is collecting materials from village destroyed by typhoon

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Sketches of elements, Victims, John Hejduk

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Enclave

Geographically, an enclave is defined as a portion of territory surrounded by a larger territory. As a result of geopolitics, enclaves usually represents a completely different state excluded from the surrounding environment. The contemporary definition of enclave could also be expanded to a wider context such as gated community due to the different social class segregation. The limitations of the inward development of the enclave presenting a characteristic of uncontrollable, self-adaptive, and barbaric growth, prompting architects to think about their responsibilities and alternative modes of urbanization in the future.

In the 1970s, with the destruction of the Second World War, Berlin was divided into two opposing cities-East and West. West Berlin had become an island, a city enclosed by a perimeter wall. In 1977 a group of architects launched a rescue project called Berlin as a Green Archipelago.13 Led by Oswald Mathias Ungers, the group included Rem Koolhaas, Peter Risemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska. They proposed an alternative model of 'cities within the city'.

The radical idea started from the urban crisis of Berlin.

With the prediction of depopulation, the urbanization process is impossible to expand the capacity of the city to the suburbs but to concentrate on points or islands in the city. Each island was equipped with basic community services becoming an autonomous artefact led to a green archipelago for communitarian life while the areas between the islands were imagined as the 'sea' where any sort of selforganized activities or informal and nomadic lifestyle could happen. This project envisioned the city in a hostile territory where some parts of the city were clearly defined, the more

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13 The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (The MIT Press, 2011), Pier Vittorio Aureli, 5.

The city within the city: Oswald Mathias Ungers, OMA, and the Project of the City as Archipelago, p177

other parts were released into a void. This emptiness and nothingness were emancipated from the conventional urban planning led to a place of wildness where anything could happen.

Berlin as a Green Archipelago, O.M. Ungers et al, 1977

In 1984, the project Victims was presented for the PrinzAlbrecht-Palais competition for the construction of a memorial park. The site has over 100 years of history, occupied by Gestapo headquarter which contained a torture chamber during the Second World War. John Hedujk employed the notion of 'city within the city' by O. M. Ungers, creating an enclave within the city. In his design, the site is enclosed and bordered by two hedges. Visitors could either reach the site crossing a drawbridge over the hedge or taking the trolley which circulates the site border and then passing through a controlled entry point. Within the enclosing hedges, the site could be created and developed over time, specifically over two thirty-years periods, and became a growing, incremental place - incremental time.

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After the process of constructing the boundary and entrance, the enclaved site is marked off in a grid locating the positions of the evergreen saplings. The saplings are all planted at once and reach full maturity during the 30-years cycle. He proposed a catalogue of 67 structures as the total completion of the project. The decision and time sequence of constructing those structures and lies with the city and citizens of Berlin.

The project is described by the architect as 'a construction of time'. Most of the structures were embodying the subject of the passing of time, such as a running trolley, a turntable, and a cantilevered hourglass. Trees located at grid points firstly are lower than the structures, transcend the height of them throughout years. Each structure has been named as a character and symbolized as a diagram. Each specific identity related to the people is tied with a strong collective memory.

As he wrote his thought in the book, 'That architectural tracings are apparitions, outlines, figments. They are not diagrams but ghosts.'14 The architecture here became an intangible apparition. Erasure never eliminates former existence, time could only be the way to meditate and heal the trauma.

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14

Victims (Architectural Association, 1986), John Hejduk, Thoughts of an Architect

Site plan, John Hejduk

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Completion state of Victims, axonometric drawing, Zishen Liu

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The Perfect Home II, Do Ho Suh, © Lehmann Maupin Gallery

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Apparition

Architecture often contains the meaning of eternity in the design purpose. In the De Archectura, Vitruvius mentioned triad characteristics associated with architecture - utilitas, firmitas and venustas (utility, strength and beauty). Its giant volume, massive consumption of resources are endowed with permanent value.

But architecture, like other artefacts, will always have moments of material destruction. Natural disasters and man-made violence can collapse this notion in an instant. In a poetic sense, the permanence of architecture is related to human existence, traces and emotions constitute a collective experience that travels throughout time. At this moment, regardless of its physical presence or not, architecture is firmly connected with memory, its former existence will be fictionalized and reproduced in the mind, forming a timelessness.

As Hejduk describes in his book Victims, 'That architectural traces as apparitions, outlines, and figments. They are not diagrams but ghosts. Tracings are similar to X-rays, they penetrate internally.'15 The revealing and reappearing of non-existent architecture formulate an apparition, which translates the timelessness of architecture into figments of memory in resonant with history and archaeology.

Different from the excavation and restoration of architectural ruins in archaeology, the notion of apparition was profoundly sought in some significant practices in the field of contemporary art. Through ghostly replicating familiar everyday settings, objects and spaces into sculptures and art installations, the artists free the subject matter from its practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with emotion and memory.

In 1990, Rachel Whiteread made her first architecturally scaled work Ghost. Through casting the interior of a Victorian living room

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15

Victims (Architectural Association, 1986), John Hejduk, Thoughts of an Architect

16 https://www.nga.gov/ collection/art-objectpage.131285.html

at 486 Archway Road in North London. An approximately nine feet high, eleven and a half feet wide, and ten feet deep plaster sculpture reversed the negative space of a room into a positive object. As she was saying that ‘viewer to become the wall’, Whiteread revealed the archaeological traces of everyday life such as the fireplace (complete with soot), the textured grain of skirting boards and the smooth surface of a window16 towards the viewer articulating a strong physicality of human and matter.

Ghost, Rachel Whiteread, 1990 Plaster and steel frame, 269 x 355.5 x 317.5 cm (105 7/8 x 139 15/16 x 125 in.) © Rachel Whiteread

Whiteread expanded this inverted concept in another project House (1993; destroyed 1994). Similar to Ghost, the large-scale in-situ con-

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crete sculpture was cast from an entire Victorian terraced house.

Through reversing the detailed interior surface towards the outside, the sculpture transformed the familiarity into a strangely unfamiliar object, drawing out the sense of sadness we all experience at memories, people and past lives now lost themes relevant for archaeology.17 House was created after all the other terraces in the row had been demolished, and it stood alone as a reminder of the working-class were previously inhabited in this area implicating social and political impact of class division and urban expansion.

House, Rachel Whiteread, 1993 © John Davies

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17

Acheson Roberts, L 2013 The Role of Sculpture in Communicating Archaeology in Museums.

Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, 23(1): 6, p9

Rather than Whiteread’s method of transforming the negative space into a monumental entity, Korean artist Do Ho Suh focuses on negatives, his translucent fabric installation precisely and subtly depicting the space he lived before, representing a strong individual emotion, self-identity and spatial memory.

18 Newman, Sarah (2018) "Do Ho Suh," Oz: Vol. 40. https:// doi.org/10.4148/23785853.1590

https:// worldarchitecture.org/ article-links/epfpn/do_ ho_suhs_fullscale_ replica_installation_the_ perfect_home_ii_is_on_ view_at_the_brooklyn_ museum.html 20 https:// worldarchitecture.org/ article-links/epfpn/do_ ho_suhs_fullscale_ replica_installation_the_ perfect_home_ii_is_on_ view_at_the_brooklyn_ museum.html 19

Do Ho Suh was born in Seoul and immigrated to the United States to study and work, and then moved to London. His personal experience of travelling between the three places made him re-examine the life of cultural displacement and rethink the notion of migration. His idea of ​​recreating his home began after he moved from Seoul to New York. After spending a sleepless night in a noisy new apartment, he was full of a strong desire for the tranquillity of his childhood home in Korea and developed the desire to replicate it in a portable form.18 As he explained: “At some point in life, you have to leave your home. When you go back, it is not the same home anymore. Home is something you carry along with your life. I deal with that issue visually... I had to make something that’s light and transportable, something you can fold and put in a suitcase and bring with you all the time.”19 In his site-specific large scale installations, he replicated his former residence on a 1:1 scale. Those Homes were entirely constructed by translucent hand-sewn gauzy nylon and metal wire. All the details such as full-sized bathtub, radiator, intercom, fireplace have been correctly sewn and stitched in place and rendered in a semi-transparent, lightweight fabric.20 The sewing of fabric material is derived from Korean traditional hand-sewing technics. In Korean, jitda means make a dress and to make a house, both of which are containers of personal space and have an intimacy that is shared. The particular fabric he works with is used in Korean summer wear and is cheap and readily accessible.

Through overlaying translucent textiles of different colours, light,

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wind, and smell can penetrate, not only reconstructing physical space but transmitting the memory of space, forming a ghostly intangible space.

Do Ho Suh wanders between the pursuit of reality and figment, and the mobile homes he created became a powerful metaphor.

These homes can be packaged, carried with him, and erected in any place not only to reproduce his former residence but also to reflect his identity to the nomads, rethink the relationship between permanence and temporality. Modern urban nomads do not simply migrate from one city to another, but live between cities, maintaining such a state of fluid for a long time. The anxiety and uncertainty of life in exile are encapsulated by light and fragile Homes and the boundary between private and public will be blurred in the buzz of the metropolis.

Seoul Home/Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home, Do Ho Suh, 2012 Silk and metal armature © Do Ho Suh

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Perfect Home Installation view 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan 2012

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Perfect Home Installation view 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan 2012

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Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, Do Ho Suh, 2011-2014.

Polyester fabric and stainless steel tubes. 96 7/16 × 271 5/8 × 169 5/16 in. (245 × 689.9 × 430.1 cm).

Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, downtown location, 2016.

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Do Ho Suh – Basin, Apartment A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2015. polyester fabric, stainless steel wire © Do Ho Suh

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Aureli, Pier Vittorio, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture.

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Dimitris Pikionis, 2018 Hidden Architecture, St. Dimitrios Loumbardiaris Church by Dimitris Pikionis, 2018 Binet, Hélène, Landscaping the Athens Acropolis, 1989 - 2013 Baan, Iwan, Ningbo History Museum by Amateur Architecture Studio, 2008 Hejduk, John, Victims. London: Architectural Association, 1986 Davies, John, House (Rachel Whiteread), 1993 Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home/Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home, 2012

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